Chapter Text
4th January, 1988. Monday. 8:11am and bright white fog pressed up against all the windows, all sounds distant and dampened. Light reflecting off it strangely. No birdsong. Cold even inside.
Still in bed, Kaoru rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, letting his notebook fall onto the sheets beside him and his hand go slack around his pen. In his head he continued narrating, a habit he could never quite break himself of: cold even in the bed, cold on the pillow next to me. Seven months and seventeen days since Masa died. Electrics playing up again.
Which was true: as he lay there, staring listlessly up at the ceiling, the overhead light was wincing on and off, on and off, like a bad migraine, and the radio that sat on his bedside table was emitting a faint low murmur of sound, of talk, an oddly close sort of noise that felt fuzzy and warmly textured, like fur. Talk radio, which he didn't like and never would have chosen for himself. It drove him to distraction; those friendly, buddy-buddy voices chattering on, needling him at him. Like they wanted something from him; some response. Like they couldn't just let him be alone.
In a short, decisive movement he pulled the radio's plug out of the wall. There: silence.
There was a pause, and then the lights flickered more strongly than ever.
It was a new notebook day. They had been good days before, once; exciting days. Back when he used to write about interesting things. Back when he used to write about things of value. Kaoru had a headache; the sullen, dragging dregs of yesterday's headache still hanging miserably around, still pounding away dully behind his eyes. The fresh white sheet of paper with his first notes of the morning seemed to scream at him with its brightness. He resisted the urge – surprisingly strong – to take up his pen and cover it in jagged scribbles.
Instead he wrote, meeting the psychic today, midday, at a bar in Shinsekai called Black Dog. Expecting an ancient, shrunken sort of woman, body dressed in gauzy layers, something about her person jingling softly – strings and strings of silvery astrological symbols and charms and amulets looped around her wrists and neck. Ugly, chunky rings set with thick milky stones. In my imagination she leans forward and grips my hand in hers to read the lines in my palm. She talks in uncomfortable, make-believe jargon: fates, destinies, third eyes. She tells me I am stubborn and headstrong and arrogant. She tells me I am insecure and sad. She tells me I am ruthless.
He paused to rub briefly at his forehead and then added, a prediction of my own: I loathe her already. Then, he made himself close his notebook and stand up and get in the shower. He soaped himself up briskly: he had noticed that if he dawdled too long under the warm water then his head would start to droop and his spine would sag and he would start to simply hang there, limp and hollow, feeling almost completely unable to face the day at all. Better to be quick about it; pragmatic, businesslike. He washed his hair with a vigour that was almost painful, and turned the water off with a defiant twist of his wrist. Once the steam dissipated it was cold again, even though the thermostat said 22. Outside the entire view was white and Kaoru towelled his body off roughly and chose clothes without really looking at them because it was so cold: jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater. His hands felt stiff and his skin over-sensitive. The cold seemed to be coming not from the air but from inside him, where he'd always, after all, expected it would be: emanating from his very bones. There didn't seem to be any way to warm up. He drank a cup of scalding coffee anyway, huddled up on the sofa with a blanket around his shoulders.
I look like shit, he wrote with a satisfying savageness. Dark circles under my eyes, shivering. I think I've lost weight. About six pounds.
In the old days Masaru would have noticed the change in his body, the new angle to the jut of his ribcage and the sudden sharpness of a hip, and pushed him to eat something. He'd had such a worried way about him, such a hangdog aura of I can't believe you won't do this one little thing for me, that Kaoru had stuffed himself just to get the mournful look off his face. It wasn't like he didn't want to eat; he just got buried too deep in things, forgot about his body and its need to be fed. He stopped noticing, to be honest. There was a lot that he had stopped noticing. Now that Masa was gone there was nobody to hector him about it; there was nobody to look at him properly, or closely, or regularly. His first inkling that Masa might not be coming back had been the caving-in sort of sensation between his bones, the hollowing of his abdomen. Hunger. His love for Masaru, in the first awful evening that he was really gone and the days after, had been experienced as a kind of emptiness. It didn't come as a surprise that his body was now starting to fall in.
'Fuck off,' he told himself violently, and put a tape in the hi-fi: Station to Station. Looking at David Bowie's picture on the cover, it was hard to imagine that he hadn't also, once upon a time, felt himself to be a completely hollow person.
He wasted the morning. When he found splintery fractals of ice forming inside his water glass (somehow the cold always seemed to be deepest around his desk), he tugged a coat and scarf and hat over his body and set out into the streets, his hands thrust deep inside his pockets and his notebook and pen knocking against his hip with every step. The fog was giving all the normal city noise a strange, echoey quality, as though it was all happening much further away than normal. Station to Station was still winding its way around inside his ears, little snippets of wonderful wonderful wonder when taking up the rhythm of his steps; his headache beating in time with it's not the side effects of the cocaine, I'm thinking that it must be love. In 1984 he had been one of the final candidates in line to interview Bowie for Rockslide magazine, but there had turned out to be too many scheduling conflicts on the side of the talent: Bowie had Live Aid to prepare for and a new Berlin-based lover. Kaoru was the only person he knew who had been stood up by Ziggy Stardust. Maybe just as well: cocaine made Kaoru sneeze and his favourite translator found English accents mysteriously harder to decode than American. On the other hand, Bowie might have been the one interview big enough to keep him from being fired. If it had happened. If it had gone well. If Bowie had decided that Kaoru's needs were greater than those of the starving Ethiopians. A tough sell.
If Masaru were alive he'd have told Kaoru that he was rambling. Because there was nobody around to do that any more, Kaoru grasped hold of his keys inside his pocket and stabbed them abruptly against the side of his leg. Idiot. Fucking idiot. It was too early for a drink so he went into a hole-in-the-wall cafe and ordered more coffee, black, and a sandwich. Whilst he ate he got his notebook out and wrote down some notes ahead of his meeting with the psychic – planning work that he'd done already, really, but it was soothing to write it down again; to put it in his best script. His list of prepared questions: how did you first find out that you had psychic abilities? What kinds of things can you do (move objects with your mind, see the future, talk to ghosts)? How do you feel about being a complete and total fucking fraud who preys on the gullible and the desperate and the grieving? How does it feel to take money from those people? Do you agree with me that what you do is a sign of a serious character defect and that you rightly belong in some sort of strict institution? How do you live with yourself, anyway?
Well, maybe not. But it was nice to dream. The magazine that had commissioned the piece was a slightly new age type of publication that wanted a balanced view, not the kind of fact-driven piece that Kaoru had built his reputation upon; they wanted an article that, if not entirely positive, was at least open to interpretation. And really, what sort of bullshit was that? It would be useless, worse than useless; it would end up not even being worth the paper it was printed on; still, it would net Kaoru a decent thirty thousand yen – not an insignificant chunk of his rent.
It agonised him, sometimes, that one of the biggest strains of Masaru's death had been the financial one: the halved rent and bills suddenly made whole. Masa had died intestate – he'd been twenty-eight; who had a will at twenty-eight? – and so everything had reverted to his family. Kaoru got nothing except his clothes, which they hadn't wanted and had no idea what to do with.
The sandwich was pallid-tasting, the bread artificially textureless and sweet in a way that made the coffee taste like gall. He paid without finishing and it was still only ten o'clock, so he wandered a few blocks further down to the Tower Records that stood on the corner. There were posters advertising new albums in the window, all with release dates that now seemed relegated to a dim and depressing former year, 1987: a Frank Zappa box set, a new Aretha record, Madonna and Neil Diamond. Inside it was warm and musty and smelled of cigarettes and, subtly, of plastic from the rows and rows of glinting tape cassettes: a smoother, lighter kind of plastic smell than the heavy, oily, sharp scent of vinyl records. There were a few well-suited, slicked-back yuppie types browsing the new imports; everybody else in the shop was a teenager, including the boy stacking the shelves and the girl behind the counter, which made Kaoru feel old and somehow sad, and tired. This had used to be a place where he belonged.
The click of cassette cases was quiet, soothing. He trailed his fingers over them and let his eyes fall closed for a moment. He would have to call his landlord about the electrics, again. Both the radio and the television had developed the disconcerting habit of turning on in the middle of the night: it couldn't continue. He would have to call his landlord. He would have to. He drifted. The tapes underneath his fingers went click, click, click. Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News, Human League. The sound system in the shop was playing Neil Young's Heart of Gold, quietly. Kaoru had every Neil Young album already, mostly on vinyl. He appreciated a big-city Canadian acting like he had swaggered out of the bayou: it made the world seem not nearly so disastrously huge. Kaoru bought a whole bagful of new tapes in the end, even though he couldn't really afford them.
By some miracle, it was almost noon by the time he left. There had been times before, quite recently before, where he'd been so busy that it felt like he'd barely had time to think; times when he ate food without tasting it and showered in a frantic haze and slept standing up, blinking suddenly awake. He'd been like the eye of the hurricane, whirled smoothly and silently along in the centre of all that chaos and noise. Without it, all that was really left was the quiet. It was only when he paid for something in a shop or took a rare phone call from his editor that he realised how creaky and rough and unused his voice was; how quickly it was falling out of practice.
Black Dog was a dive with a long, scratched wooden counter, the yeasty smell of spilled beer rising from the floor and the furniture and maybe even the walls. Somebody had put Janice Joplin on the jukebox, and both the bartender and the bar's only patron, a long-haired man sitting up at the counter, were singing along in low, enthusiastic voices.
'I want you to come on, come on, come on—'
'Excuse me,' Kaoru said.
'And take it! Take another little piece of my heart—'
'Excuse me,' Kaoru said more firmly, and in unison two faces swivelled towards him: the bartender, a decidedly irritated look on his face, and the long-haired man at the bar. His eyes, oddly luminous, lit on Kaoru's face. He had obviously only just come in from the outside: little droplets of mist glinted like gems in his hair, and his cheeks and lips and nose were pink, either from cold or from pleasure. He was smiling; he slipped from his bar stool.
'Niikura,' he said warmly, adding a bow as a kind of afterthought, 'I'm Hara. Toshiya.'
Kaoru blinked. Instinctively, his fingers twitched as if to curl around a pen.
'You're the psychic,' he said steadily. Was it his imagination, or did the bartender smirk? When Kaoru glanced at him, his gaze was so stony it might have been that way forever.
'Get a table,' he told the psychic in a low, gruff sort of voice. 'I'll bring your drinks.'
'You're a sweetheart,' the psychic said exaggeratedly, blowing him a kiss, actually blowing him a kiss, and the bartender glowered and said something very unprofessional. Apparently unfazed, the psychic almost skipped over to a dank-looking booth, and obediently Kaoru slid into place opposite him. The banquette felt lumpy beneath him. The smell of beer was stronger here. An ashtray landed on the table between them with a rude clatter, followed shortly by two cloudy glasses of kirin. The psychic raised his glass.
'Your good health,' he said cheerfully, and took a large swallow.
Kaoru's fresh white notebook page looked like the cleanest thing that had touched this table in years. He uncapped his pen and glanced up briefly.
'One moment, please,' he said shortly, all he could manage before the words started to spill out in a torrent, the ink spreading across the page as though it was unspiralling through water: the psychic is young, 24, 25, and he sits opposite me in a Talking Heads T-shirt and plaid shirt, scarf half unwound from his neck, black hair spilling everywhere, not like a witch but like he's just fallen out of bed. The surface of the table was so scratched that it was making his writing come out uneven. The bar, Black Dog, is dark and unapologetically filthy. Takes up the lower floor of a building that somebody forgot, on a street that only exists to connect two better places to each other. Nobody else in here. Janice Joplin on the jukebox changing to Patti Smith, too optimistic for this dump; somewhere this dark wants torch songs, soul, smoky jazz. Etta James or Billie Holiday.
He raised his eyes to the psychic smiling at him in a slightly amused sort of way. Kaoru fought the urge to curl his arm around his work as though he was in school, but reminded himself that the psychic was unlikely to read shorthand, especially upside down. And anyway, it didn't matter. In order to look like a human, he took a sip of his beer.
'So you're the psychic,' he said again, trying to inject some strength into his voice, and the amused smile on Hara's face widened. He leant forward a little, like a conspirator; the ends of his hair swept the table.
'You were expecting a woman,' he said confidingly, 'All ancient and crumpled, dressed up like a little old shaman. Right?'
'Is that a prediction?' Kaoru asked lightly, and the psychic sat back.
'Just making conversation. Mind if I smoke?'
In answer, Kaoru simply shook his own pack of cigarettes, and the psychic gave a gratified nod. 'Cool. So what's this for, anyway?'
'Wayfarer Magazine. They seem to think that you don't give interviews.'
'I don't give interviews,' Hara agreed.
'I thought I was going to have a fight on my hands, but you said yes right away. Why?'
'Oh. Well, your voicemail sounded so sad,' the psychic said. He lit up a cigarette and puffed with obvious enjoyment. 'It sort of felt like an ethical issue.'
Kaoru looked at him solidly. 'I wasn't sad.'
The psychic shrugged easily. 'Have it your way.'
'So, Hara—'
'Toshiya. Please.'
Kaoru smiled tightly. 'I'd really rather if—'
'No, I'm gonna have to insist,' the psychic said playfully, and Kaoru suppressed a sigh.
'So, Toshiya,' he said, placing perhaps a little more stress on the syllables of his name than was necessary, 'You say you're psychic. Explain that to me.'
'Psychic is just a convenient word for it,' Toshiya shrugged, wrapping both of his hands around his beer glass and holding it tight – an oddly childlike gesture. 'But really, what it is is that I can speak to dead people.'
The urge to laugh was strong and explosive as a sneeze; by a grim force of will, Kaoru kept his face straight.
'Ghosts,' he clarified, and Toshiya blew a smoke ring.
'I think of them more as like...spirits. Or souls.' He regarded the ring with satisfaction as it started to break apart, 'Just feels more polite.'
'You wouldn't want to offend anyone,' Kaoru offered in restrained tones, and Toshiya nodded.
'Exactly.'
'So you speak to dead people.'
'Yeah. Sometimes I can see them, too, and a lot of the time I can kind of feel them around.'
'So a cemetery must feel like a crowded shopping centre to you,' Kaoru said, barely polite, and Toshiya gave a strained sort of laugh. Maybe he wasn't as oblivious to Kaoru's attitude as he seemed.
'I don't go to graveyards. It's...too much. Too much all at once. I – they're all trapped with their stories, inside their stories, really, with nobody to listen; nobody who can listen. Except me. It's sort of overwhelming.'
'Of course,' Kaoru said savagely, and Toshiya gave him a cool sort of look.
'I don't care if you don't believe me,' he said plainly. 'I don't care if you write up in your magazine that I'm deluded or a fraud or a liar.'
'Be bad for business though, wouldn't it?' Kaoru goaded, and Toshiya frowned.
'Business?'
'Well this is your job, isn't it?'
Toshiya exhaled smoke through his nose, making him look momentarily like an angry dragon.
'My job,' he enunciated clearly, 'Is working here, behind the bar, four nights a week. I don't charge for anything else.'
Kaoru picked up his pen, and then put it down again. He took a sip of his drink.
'Oh,' he said.
The music had stopped. An uncomfortable sort of silence settled over the table, broken only by the muffled cursing of the bartender as he slapped the side of the jukebox angrily. Without looking away from Kaoru, Toshiya called, 'Just shake it, Kyo.'
The answer he got back was less than polite, but from over Toshiya's shoulder there came a cacophony of shaking and then Eurythmics' Thorn In My Side started halfway through.
Somehow, the atmosphere recovered itself: it seemed that Toshiya wasn't the type to hold a grudge. Kaoru made notes and conducted the rest of his initial interview in a more or less courteous manner, and Toshiya answered his questions pragmatically – none of the foggy-voiced, faraway-eyed mysticism Kaoru had expected. When Kaoru almost sheepishly brought up the idea of tests, little trials of his supposed abilities, Toshiya agreed to be examined with a disappointing lack of evasiveness or anxiety. They finished their drinks and the bartender brought them two more with his usual lack of grace; when they finished those, the system repeated itself. To Kaoru's surprise, he found himself starting to relax slightly – just a little, like a white and weakened plant putting out a single stem towards the sunlight. The bar's one small window was bleary with accumulated grime and the fog outside, and it became difficult to know what time it was. Toshiya produced a fifty yen coin from his pocket and held it up, where it glinted like his eyes. 'Wanna choose some songs?'
Charm, Kaoru wrote, must be a part of his operation: getting close to people quickly, getting under their guard, so they release the details about themselves that he needs to perfect his ruse. When he talks he gestures with his hands so wildly that he's come close to almost knocking his drink over a few times: is he trying some kind of misdirection? He hesitated and then added: it works, his charm. Sitting opposite him, I enjoy him; it's hard to resist liking him. If he wanted to he could be sitting on a fortune, not as a small-time psychic but as a televangelist. So why isn't he? Has it just never occurred to him?
'I was a freaky kid,' Toshiya laughed, the sound of it curling warmly around Kaoru's ears like smoke, 'Seeing things other people didn't, talking to people that weren't there. The dead don't look like ghosts, you know. They're not see-through, and they don't hover. They're in this world, where the rules stay the same: a soul is still an object. It can't pass through other things, or levitate, or disappear at will.'
'So you were perceived as strange?'
'Pretty much, until I learned to keep my mouth shut. I stopped talking about it, and I only spoke to dead people when there wasn't anybody else around. In time I got better at telling the dead and the living apart. Things got more normal for me.'
'You said – this world, like there are others. Do you think there are?'
And Toshiya looked at him with his wide, dark, somehow lambent eyes.
'It's not a normal state,' he said seriously, 'for the dead to be here. They aren't supposed to stick around. The ones that do are trapped. Stuck between places.'
'Stuck,' Kaoru noted, and Toshiya gave his head an impatient shake.
'I always pictured it,' he said clearly, 'Like a bridge. Between this world, and the next. And the view from that bridge is incredible, because you can see everything: all of time, all of the world, all that ever happened or ever will happen. But the longer you linger there, watching it all happen, the harder it is to leave.'
'Leave, and go where?'
Toshiya shrugged. 'On,' he said simply.
Kaoru was astonished to find, quite suddenly, that it was past four o'clock. The psychic's eyes seemed to be boring into him. He dropped his gaze, and closed his notebook.
'That should be enough for today,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I've taken up a lot of your time.'
Toshiya leant back against the banquette, looking at Kaoru in a curious kind of way.
'If it's all right,' Kaoru soldiered on, 'I'll call you this evening, to set up some of the experiments we talked about.'
'Whatever you like.'
Kaoru hesitated. 'Okay. I'll see you.'
Outside the fog felt thicker than ever, shining eerily in the weak winter sunshine. It was like walking through a field of jewels.